Maybe a relationship will end all my problems?

Ashley Wells, Seven, Amber Larson, Wisdom Quarterly; alt-J; Bhikkhu Bodhi; Method PUA

Sex? alt-J Breezeblock: "Please don't go, I love you so!" Reverse makes no sense! See it forward:

Looking for a diversion, an emotional distraction, a personal relationship to fill the void on Paris' "Bridge of Love Locks" over the Seine ("sane"), a popular tourist attraction (kunm.org)

.

Oops! - Captain Chaos, you've done it again!

Our teacher Bhikkhu Bodhi once wrote in "The Quest for Meaning" that, just as Nature does not tolerate a vacuum, humans will not tolerate a loss of meaning.

Then to escape the plunge into an abyss of meaninglessness, we grab for anything to immerse ourselves in distractions.

Answer to all my problems: Jeremy!

What do we do? Bhikkhu Bodhi says, We pursue pleasure and power, seek wealth and status, surround ourselves with contraptions, invest our hopes in personal relationships to conceal our inner poverty.

We use our absorption in whatever distractions we can find to help us cope with our psychological VOID. But then this stifles a deeper, more insistent need -- our longing for freedom and peace that does not depend upon anything external.

What if I were to love myself? No!

We don't need a religion, a relationship, or a Revolver (like the Beatles who claimed "happiness is a warm gun").  But we need something!

Maybe "thing" is not the right word for what we need. If we had accomplishments, we'd feel better. We may not need them, but they wouldn't hurt. Maybe we need capabilities. We may not need them (or we may already have them uncovered and untapped), but they wouldn't hurt.

Breaking up is sad not because who we were with was so great, but because we know we're never going to be able to get someone this good again. At least that's what we think in our loss. Maybe what we need is to become Pick Up Artists (PUA) with style, a little substance, and a lot of sex -- but not all crazy like Method or that killer.

 

No, I think LOVE would work, somebody else's love. I have nothing higher to live for! Just like this video, which tells the story of a passionate relationship backwards and forwards:
 

Our Relationship in Forward

Vesak 2014 with Bhikkhu Bodhi at Bodhi Monastery, New Jersey (bodhimonastery.org)

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• NOT MY BEACH: Commission to fine rich property owners who illegally block public access to beaches in California The Oakland Tribune reports that the commission has been without the authority to levy fines since its creation in 1976.

Netherlands: Learn Dutch or get out (video)

Ashley Wells and CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Swampland (TIME.com, video)

 

Occupy Wall St.

France's Muslim "face veil" (burka) ban is just the latest controversial law aimed at assimilating new immigrants in Europe. The Netherlands now requires Dutch fluency to become a citizen. More

• 

  Sexy Syria

  "Naughty lingerie" in conservative Syria
• Photographing Aisha for the cover of TIME
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Dictator Putin

• When Putin was "Person of the Year"
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Afghan women

• Portraits of the women of Afghanistan
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The Best Thing About Being a Girl! (video)

Amber Larson, Ashley Wells, Seven, Crystal Quintero, Pat Macpherson, Wisdom Quarterly

U.S. model before and after Photoshop

Like I guess it would be the way you can be cute and like wear makeup and like, you know, I don't know, just like be yourself but cute and with makeup and, yeah, that's the best thing!

Oh, and being paid by ginormous corporate sponsors to harm the image of chicks and like everybody else, that's pretty cool, too! Can we, like, go to Sephora now?

(NET) Gender stereotyping promotes sexism thanks to Disney and its corporate fortunes

OMG! :-O

Media images of females sank to new lows in the U.S. in the last year for which data is available. The usual suspects are responsible -- Disney Corp., the Associated Press (AP), Hollywood moguls, the porn industry, gentleman's clubs, marketers, PR firms, modeling agencies, and maybe us.

Tori Amos' song for Wes Anderson (npr.og)

Of course WQ is to blame, too, but by "us" we mean it in the larger sense of the U.S. population. We are the consumers, and corporations claim the demanders of such images, TV portrayals, and gender stereotypes. One day FEMEN will come to these shores from the Ukraine, and it'll be death to the patriarchy.  Until then, at the very least, one ought to avoid the Beverly Hills Hotel as we ignore the women we injure and cast aspersions at brutal multi-billionaires like the sexist Sultan of Brunei.

• Celebs boycott Brunei-owned hotels over death by stoning

Who knew mere multi-millionaires cared?

Jay Leno, Ellen DeGeneres, and others protested outside the Beverly Hills Hotel, owned by the sexist/misogynist and patriarchal Sultan of Brunei (who is worth 20 billion) -- the first ruler to establish Sharia Law in S.E. Asia... (L.A. Now) Brunei law on women and gays sparks Beverly Hills Hotel boycott

• U.S. Military rapes, sexual assaults up 50% last year 
• U.N. charges Vatican with child rapes, torture by priests 
• U.N. grills Vatican on gay Catholic clerical sexual abuse

Our Brains on Porn

Hank talks about something or other then finally gets to the sex at Minute 4:14. Fast forward. 

Jean Kilbourne asks... hot or not?

A brain on porn has a lot in common with a brain on religion. They both make part of the anxious brain turn off, at least in women, according to the Journal of Sexual Medicine and Dutch physicians. There is no "GOD spot," claims Hank, but in the bedroom he could be proven wrong. In addition to space talk, this short episode touches on: synthetic biology, XNA (xenonucleic acids), polymerase, evolution, evolve, religion, porn, pornography, journal of sexual medicine, brain, sexual arousal, anxiety, sex, religion, spirituality, parietal lobe, and the brain's GOD spot. More

 

Killing Us Softly

(CM)

After all, what are BOOBS for?

In this highly anticipated update of her pioneering "Killing Us Softly" series, Jean Kilbourne takes a fresh look at how advertising traffics in distorted and destructive ideals of femininity.

This simultaneously defines or alter-casts destructive norms of masculinity as opposite or separate rather than cooperative and united. All whole humans are both feminine and masculine.

The film marshals a range of new print and television advertisements to lay bare a stunning pattern of damaging gender stereotypes -- images and messages that too often reinforce unrealistic and unhealthy perceptions of beauty, perfection, and sexuality.

 

For porn and selling clothes. D'uh. Obviously!

By bringing Kilbourne's groundbreaking analysis up to date, Killing Us Softly 4 challenges a new generation of students to take advertising seriously and to think critically about popular culture and its relationship to sexism, eating disorders, and gender violence.

Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D. is internationally recognized for her groundbreaking work on the image of women in advertising and for her critical studies of alcohol and tobacco advertising. In the late 1960s she began her exploration of the connection between advertising and several public health issues, including violence against women, eating disorders, and addiction, and launched a movement to promote media literacy as a way to end and prevent these problems.

A radical and original idea at the time, this approach is now mainstream and an integral part of most prevention programs. Her films, lectures, and TV appearances have been seen by millions throughout the world. 

Kilbourne was named by The New York Times Magazine one of the three most popular speakers on college campuses. She is the creator of the renowned "Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image of Women" film series and the author of the award-winning book Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel and co-author of So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids.

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Occupy Wall St. activist Cecily McMillan guilty of assault 
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Philippines, US launch military drills; Filipinos protest troop deal 
Ex-deputy nuclear weapons cmdr reprimanded in gambling case 
Report: NRA, restaurant lobby monitored fast food protests
Sheriff candidates urge supervisors to delay jail expansion plan
Cornel West speaks at against solitary-confinement in NY

Coachella begins: Weekend 2, 2014 (video)

Eds., Wisdom Quarterly; YouTube/Coachella; Buzzfeed; 98.7; Randall Roberts (LA Times)

Coachella bikini-clad bhumi-devas go on display (Naomi Zeichner/buzzfeed.com)

Eat your hearts out as I do my best Miley acid... She's in the hospital OD'ing on antibiotics?

LA has a $10 alternative in Brokechella but, "Space is far out, man!" (alt987fm.com)

(Coachella) See highlights of Weekend 1. Fan photos. Watch VIDEO

  

Coachella is a one horse polo field in desert

It's a once-in-a-lifetime show like Woodstock '69, but it happens every year, twice. Never mind all that; it's Coac-hell-aaaaaaa! Get in the carpool, and shut up. Here we go again -- the lawn, the price gouging, the sun damage, and the wooooo!

Katy Perry in the audience

INDIO, California - As a giant impenetrable scrum of attendees waited for New Zealand singer Lorde, 17, to take the Outdoor stage at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, nearby, MGMT played the main stage, and the chorus of its song "The Youth" gusted in toward Lorde's crowd like a portent.
 
"The youth is starting to change," offered singer Andrew VanWyngarden as the band's psychedelic disco slow jam drifted in. "Are you starting to change? Are you, together?"

No one much smiles unless one holds up a camera or until the music whisks a concertgoer away for a moment in an overheated tent or a massive mosh pit (latimes.com).

When I was 17, Wknd 1

A few minutes later, as if conjured by MGMT's query, arrived Lorde. Dressed in white and seeming every bit a future figurehead, she took the stage just after the distant song had arrived at its ethereal ending mantra: "the youth… the youth… the youth." It felt like a clarion call.

• LINEUP: Celebs and Coachella set list
• PHOTOS: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3
• Visit Coachella Fest by air ($1,500)

Call it coincidence or a mystical accident of fate, but that moment on Saturday seemed to capture this year's festival for me: a musical event firmly listing away from past glory and toward a synthesized future. More

Locals left out when world comes to party
Josie Huang (KPCC/SCPR.org, April 18, 2014)

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival has been a fixture in Indio [Spanish for "Indian"] for 15 years -- or, in the parlance of some city teenagers, “forever.” And that comes with perks and drawbacks. Big perk: The marching band at Indio’s Shadow Hills High School was invited to perform with the electronica duo Big Gigantic when the festival opened last weekend. More

Sobriety is one of the best things about Coachella Music and Arts Festival (buzzfeed.com)

After 100 Years of Solitude, then what?

• 100 Years of Solitude Latin author and icon Gabriel Garcia Marquez dies Thursday 
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Hollywood Reporter's 35 Most Powerful People in NY Media 2014



Taking L.A.'s traffic woes east into the desert

Happy Pi Day! (Science Friday) π

Pat Macpherson vs. Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; ScienceFriday.com; Vihart (video)

E=MC2 thinks Einstein (NVOR)

Today is March 14th, which means Pi (π) Day. You know that stupid math thingy, not the time Peter figured out how much he really loved pie (or not). Sorry, pi (and pie) lovers! Both can be solved with toothpicks. Maybe pick a better favorite number and food next time? Here's a celebratory video from sexy Flora(l) Lichtman, MA Shumin, and Ira Flatow over at SciFri.
 

Ooh, Pat, who gives an s?

Friday 3.14 is Pi Day, and we're all celebrating. Sci Fri even hit the streets of New York City to spread some math-holiday cheer. One might be surprised how many π enthusiasts are lingering outside of New York University's Math Department.
 

P.S. It's also famous Jewish-Buddhist-Pantheist Albie Einstein's birthday.

(Family Guy) The love of pie in another part of the multiverse

 

Winnie on what sucks

Twenty-five years ago, physicist Larry Shaw, of San Francisco’s Exploratorium, established the first “Pi Day” on March 14th, or 3/14 -- a fitting date to commemorate an irrational number that so familiarly begins 3.14. 

 

The event started as a little staff get-together but ballooned into an international holiday. (Really, just listen to this SciFri segment).

I love pie, and pi is nice, too.

To get everyone -- including Winnie from in the celebratory mood, here are some tributes to those endless digits, and to the Greek letter that symbolizes them. More

Definition: (Wiki) The number π is a mathematical constant, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, approximately equal to 3.14159. It has been represented by the Greek letter "π" since the mid-18th century also sometimes spelled out as "pi."

Math sucks because math is a religion, and religion sucks (Calvin & Hobbes)

• The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower...
• The NSA has impersonated Facebook to spread malware (Gizmodo)
• Three years after the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown 
• Delving into security of Internet of things
• The Internet's DARK side, exposed in three new films

Origin of Universe (Buddhism and Einstein)

Wisdom Quarterly; Andreas Mamet, 2013

The Origin of the Universe through the eyes of Gautama Buddha and Albert Einstein (Part 1) in English with French translation. Continues in Part 2

Chinese discovered America (video)

CC Liu, Ashley Wells, Xochitl, Wisdom Quarterly; Sarah Todd (tricycle.com); Rick Fields

The splendor and sophistication of ancient China's walled civilization (Linc060/flickr)

(FA) Documentary about the Chinese discovery of America, with written recorded documentation in China and anthropological evidence in America, long before European explorers. This "shocking" was revealed by Rick Fields in How the Swans Came to the Lake

Buddhists in early America

Sarah Todd, Editorial Assistant (Tricycle.com)

Editor in chief James Shaheen recommended Rick Fields’ How the Swans Came to the Lake, which offers an in-depth history of Buddhism’s role in American life. Originally published in 1981 and last updated in 1992, Swans is a (mostly) current and always relevant look at Buddhism’s roots.

 

In a culture saturated with pop-Eastern philosophy -- toy Buddha car accessories, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and The Tao of [Physics and] Pooh, the now-discontinued “Om” fragrance by Gap -- it’s clear that Buddhism has secured a place in the imagination of the American public.

 

In warm, witty prose Fields takes on the question of why and how this came to be. He begins by tracing the development of America’s understanding of Buddhism, illuminating the way that misconceptions and poor translations caused even great Western thinkers to misunderstand basic [tenets] of practice.

(AHB) A Buddhist monk arrived in California/Mexico 1,000 years before

"Who Really Discovered America?" Did numerous explorers discover the "New World" long before Christopher Columbus staked a claim for Europe in 1492? No less than a dozen cultures have tales of these adventurers woven into their histories, but they are noticeably absent in American history books. This documentary explores the possibility that the Chinese, Japanese, Polynesians, Norse, Welsh, Irish, Ancient Hebrews, and the Solutreans all made it to the Americas earlier than Columbus. Rebuild the ships, trace the routes, test the artifacts and analyze blood evidence to finally learn the answer to one of the greatest mysteries of all time -- who really discovered America?

The USA is only a small part of America

From the 18th-century scholar and linguist William Jones, who understood Asian culture’s potential to offer the West an “Oriental renaissance” but “either did not know or did not accept the Buddhist’s version of the origin of their own religion,” to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote alarmingly of “This remorseless Buddhism…threatening with death and night,” Westerners often misunderstood Buddhism as a primitive form of nihilism.

Nonetheless, Fields points out that many artistic and intellectual movers-and-shakers of early America had more in common with Buddhists than they themselves may have known. Henry David Thoreau’s experiment on Walden Pond was focused on mindful sitting in nature that sounds much like Buddhist meditation; he himself wrote, “I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works.” And what else is Walt Whitman’s expansive embrace than a celebration of the interconnectedness of all beings, one of the central Buddhist understandings? First, America became ripe for Buddhism; then came the ambassadors.

 

The Western interpreters of Eastern Buddhism rose to prominence in the form of Colonel Olcott and Madame Blavatsky, spiritualists who eventually forsook their preoccupation with the afterlife to, as Blavatsky said, “point the way eastward.” Olcott sought to bring Buddhism to the public and “unite Buddhists under a common banner,” writing a book of Buddhist catechisms that was translated into nearly every European language... More

• VIDEO: Forbidden Archeology (suppressed evidence) 
• Secrets of the Ancient Mexicans: the Olmecs (BBC)
• New History of Humanity (scientific discoveries) 

(History) America was full when Italian Colombus arrived on Spanish ships

When Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, unknown to him he was on islands located between two huge land masses now known as North America and South America. It was teaming with huge civilizations rivaling any in the world at the time. There were thousands of smaller First Nations and tribes. According to recent estimates, the population may have exceeded 100 million people from Alaska and Greenland in the north, to the southern tip of South America. In proto-Canada, most people lived along the coast or along major rivers.

Los Angeles, World's Music Capital (webcast)

Ashley Wells, CC Liu, Seven, Pat Macpherson, Dev, Wisdom Quarterly; KROQ.com

Acoustic X-mas weekend, FREE WEBCAST, Dec. 7-8, 2013 beginning at 5:00 pm PST

(Cage the Elephant) "Come a Little Closer" from Melophobia (I. Rentz/S. Buchanan)

Lost City of Angels rocks! (Occupy LA)

Living in Tinsel Town has its advantages. Among them is the variety of music concentrated into a smoggy basin girded by a mountain sign, golden coastline, and a smoggy desert expanse mostly covered by asphalt.
 
The intermittent heat makes artists half baked. As previously noted, America is like a box of cereal with its seams split, shaking out on both ends, littering coasts east and west with flakes, fruits, and nuts. Los Angeles has more than its share of nuts. And many of them occupy positions of influence in the music industry.

Frenzy of excitement at a big KROQ rock show in Los Angeles (craveonline.com)

 

Miley Cyrus in L.A. twerked for the holidays

The monopolistic corporate media powers that be have assembled numerous mega-concerts for the holiday season: (CBS, Inc.) KROQ's alternative "Acoustic X-mas," KPWR (Power 106)'s hip hop/gangsta rap "Cali Christmas" (to be live streamed Dec. 14, 2013), Ryan Seacrest's pop/rap KISS FM's giant Jingle Ball. Who's playing? Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, Robin Thicke, Selena Gomez... went on last night in an enormous downtown concert stadium.

24th Annual show (kroq.cbslocal.com)

But tonight and tomorrow, all for charity, KROQ will be live webcasting a more spectacular alt-rock-pop show featuring Lorde, Cage the Elephant, Arctic Monkeys, Vampire Weekend, Grouplove, The Neighbourhood, Queens of the Stone Age, AFI (A Fire Inside), Kings of Leon, New Politics, Fitz and the Tantrums, Portugal. The Man, Bastille, Atlas Genius, Foals, Arcade Fire, and Phoenix (plus a special surprise guest).

(JK) Arctic Monkeys "Do I Wanna Know" on former KROQ DJ Jimmy Kimmel's late night show

Rap for the holidays (Power106.com)